Every now and again, someone who isn't really taking the time to read the things that I write, tells me in a dismissive tone that they have tried all that 'positive thinking nonsense' and it just does not work for them. Of course it doesn't!
I am sure that Happy Cow would join me in being a little disappointed if anyone considers our suggestions to be a form of 'positive thinking' or something similar. They are very far from that.
Love is not positive. Happiness is not positive. Both are unconditional, beyond judgements such as 'positive' or 'negative'. Love is total unconditional acceptance of whatever is. Love is moving away from judgemental thought altogether. It is neither positive thinking nor negative thinking. One cannot identify with thought and love at the same time. When we refrain from engaging with judgemental thought, there love and happiness always are, patiently waiting for our return.
But what is wrong with positive thinking? Why not think positively?
What is commonly referred to as 'positive thinking' is both judgemental and fundamentally dishonest. Some writers on the subject suggest that if you keep focusing on positive thoughts, then life will become more and more positive. The main trouble with this approach is that it just simply is not true. And deep within your Being, you know it is not true. So it creates a huge internal turmoil. You have to deny and repress the reality that life is wobbly, that life always consists of continuous cycles. Day and night. In breath and out breath. Waking and sleep. Winter and summer. Rain and shine. Birth and death. High tide and low tide. Waxing and waning. Pleasure and pain. Win some. Lose some.
It doesn't matter how much you think positively. Those cycles will continue. So what does a 'positive thinker' have to do then? They have to start denying and repressing. They have to start pretending that those things which they have arbitrarily decided to call 'negative' are not happening. They have to bury 'dark' emotion, 'naughty' impulses or 'bad' experiences and pretend they never happen to them. Such denial is often followed by projection of the 'darker' aspects of life onto some 'bad person' or group of people.
"Bad things are not happening to me! Oh, no. I am a positive person! I am always good and kind and generous and successful and confident and delightful company and sugar and spice and all things nice. Not like those nasty bad people. They are awful. I don't know how they can be like that. They are so evil! Not like me. I am gooooooooood. I am. I AM!"
But you can't fool your Being, and anything that is repressed or denied just builds up pressure, more and more pressure, until one day .......
"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it's not going to go away." Elvis Presley
Positive thinking is hypocrisy, denial, repression, self-deceit, delusion. Life is neither positive nor negative. Life just is.
Many, if not most people consider 'love' to be a 'positive' emotion. But I would like to suggest that it is nothing of the sort. Love is totally non-judgemental and therefore neither positive nor negative. Love simply never judges anything, and because of this, it is beyond and free from all notions of 'positive' or 'negative', 'good' or 'bad', 'success' or 'failure', 'worthy' or 'unworthy' etc. Love totally and unconditionally accepts whatever happens.
Up and down the cycles go. Love loves, for no reason. Success and failure come and go. Happiness remains happy, for no reason. Both reside beyond the influence of the inevitable cycles, beyond thought, in another dimension.
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two IMPOSTERS just the same;" Rudyard Kipling
A while ago, someone asked me how we can possibly have love without hate. There is a common misunderstanding that love is the opposite of hate. It is not. If we are going to pretend for a moment that these opposites are real, then desire is the opposite of hate. One is very strong wanting and the other is very strong not wanting. Desire and personal attachment are very often mistaken for love. But they are very far from love. Love desires nothing, possesses nothing.
Love is beyond both desire and hate. Love has no opposite. People often argue that everything has its polar opposite. I would suggest that is not true at all. In fact, all polar opposites are inventions of judgemental human minds.
"Thought keeps on thinking either/or. Reality is invariably neither/both. No wonder people get confused!"
The question was a bit like asking 'how can we possibly taste honey without at the same time tasting anti-honey?'
Such polarities do not exist in Reality, they only exist in human thought.
"I recently visited Hawaii. To the west was the Far East and to the east was The West. That's the kind of thing that always happens when you try to divide up a continuum using only two concepts."
Listening to judgemental thought always distances us from real Life.
The next time someone suggests positive thinking to you, be aware that they are suggesting that you take a trip down a path of dishonesty, delusion, denial, repression and hypocrisy. Remember that like all paths do, this path will lead you away from Reality, away from acceptance, away from Love and happiness, which are your natural state when you stop engaging with judgemental thought.
Whether judgement is positive or whether it is negative, it is judgement. Where judgement is, Love is not.
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